Resilience and entrepreneurship endure, despite the conflict
While many of us are watching the Iran-Israel conflict unfold via our news media, mortgage professional Maxim Cohen (pictured) is living it. Cohen, the CEO of UK Finance Group, is currently in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, working and attending business meetings during the day, and spending his nights in a bomb shelter.
“Luckily, we've not had any sirens during this interview,” Cohen told Mortgage Introducer, giving a true sense of the danger that’s present in his life currently. “We are sleep deprived because there are a lot of rockets coming over, but they are dying down, which is good. Yesterday, I was up most of the night in the bomb shelter and then at eight in the morning I had an early morning meeting in Tel Aviv.” He continued: “I'm inspired by the people around me. We are in a time of war, which is hard, but the resilience and the entrepreneurship, especially in the financial services community, is impressive. Everyone is just getting on with life. Resilience and just getting on with things is huge.”
Getting on with things for Cohen means heading up UK Finance Group, which he founded in 2017. It offers financial solutions for businesses, property professionals and investors across the UK, including mortgage, commercial lending and insurance. It’s that role that has brought him to Tel Aviv. “I'm here raising finance for our lender, and representing a few UK lenders. which is very exciting,” he shared.
In the financial services business for more than 20 years, Cohen is the founder of the Jewish Lending Institute, with expertise in providing lending according to Halacha – which are ethical, Halachic-compliant solutions, in line with his faith. He originally planned to become a rabbi, but his desire to establish a professional career swayed him from that path until just three years ago, when he qualified and finally achieved his boyhood dream.
“Being a rabbi and trying to find more meaning in life was then, and still is, a very deep part of what I do,” he reflected. “Most people, when they're 10-years-old, want to be superheroes and I, for some reason, always wanted to be a rabbi. I came from a traditional Jewish home, very synagogue-orientated. I was always very inquisitive that there must be something more. You know, there's got to be a plan here - we can't just have landed in this world for no purpose. But I actually did what I suppose most Jewish boys do – I got a profession and qualified as an accountant. My dad is an accountant, so it was a natural thing for me. He's not your typical accountant. I'd say he's more of an entrepreneurial accountant, and has always been very driven. That’s helped us - I took a lot from him.”
Today, Cohen’s professional and faith roles cross over - he’s known in the industry as The Finance Rabbi, a nod to his Judaism, of course. “It’s not necessarily just a religion, it’s an ethnicity as well, and can be applied to day-to-day life, and the world I am involved with,” he said. “We have a big clientele from the Jewish community, naturally, but we service clients all around the UK, of all shapes and sizes.
“I always think that what I've been through in the mortgage world as a professional, you have to grow very thick skin. We've been through Brexit, COVID, Truss, inflation, and everything that’s thrown at us, and we're here to tell the tale - thank God we're all growing our businesses. I do think that it’s a very similar story within the Jewish community and maybe other minority communities as well - resilience, growing a thicker skin and that entrepreneurial spirit which really reflects the underlying communities everyone's involved in. We're here to survive. It's exciting.”
Read more: Broker gives up alcohol and saves his life
Coping with prejudice
Cohen touched on the prejudice sometimes directed at Jewish people. “When I wake up in the morning I could think, ‘Oh God, life is very difficult’,” he said. “Ultimately, you know, there are a lot of people who hate me, and hate my kids. I can look at it in that way, but on the other hand, what an opportunity, to think, ‘You know what? I can make a difference in this world, how can I make people's lives better?’ I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, ‘The one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.’ And that is a very key element to the way I think every day. It's about utilising that resilience and actually bringing it into a fantastic industry. I want to make sure that customers get to the best place, the best position and they are treated fairly. I want to be able to bring to the industry high ethical standards beyond what's the norm.”
UK Finance Group’s mortgage advisory arm has written a quarter of a billion pounds of business since it was formed six years ago, and Cohen remains positive about the market. “I think it's a very exciting time for mortgage lenders,” he said. “I'm working internationally with investors who are actively seeking to invest in the UK market. One thing I always say, the UK - it talks itself down internally, but externally, to the rest of the world, it is seen as a very stable economy, a very predictable economy, everything you want for an investment. So, I think the UK is actually seen as a great prospect for international investors who want to buy real estate, and invest in funding lines for clients and for lenders. It's very active at the moment.”
